For modern cooks today a large proportion of the recipes in the first half of the book may seem more an exercise in nostalgia than a useful and inspiring collection of dishes to cook for their friends or family. Some of them would be quite fun if you're hosting a decade-themed party or dinner party--perhaps serve a three-course meal of a light soup, Quail Pudding and Steamed Lemon Pudding if you want to re-live the 1920s. Or maybe remind children of how thankful they should be for the variety of "world" foods available today by giving them the inventive dishes of 1940s and 1950s rationing. Marguerite Patten's personal anecdotes, about working for the Ministry of Food in the war, and then demonstrating new kitchen devices and recipes for TV and radio from the mid-1940s onwards, make great reading for those with little sense of how quickly (or slowly) such appliances as fridges, electric ovens or ice-cream makers were adopted in the typical home. Her record also serves well as a reminder of how money has always affected how people eat; though she can remove the division in eating habits between those "with money" and the "poor" after the 1930s and 1940s, she still alludes to the industrial upheavals and unemployment that still affects us (and therefore our nutrition) nowadays.

Marguerite Patten's Century of British Cooking is not the most inspiring collection of recipes, but is wonderful as a historical culinary record. Her style is at times abrupt, so that random food and non-food facts are thrown together, giving odd overviews of each decade, but the recipes themselves are well laid out and easily executed. Probably the best way to enjoy these recipes is to remove them from their historical context and use the book as a cookery encyclopedia; few recipe books stretch from Thick Windsor Soup to Thai Green Curry.--Olivia Dickinson

Amazon.co.uk Review
Who, in 1899, could have predicted Gary Rhodes or the Two Fat Ladies? As the century draws to a close, the doyenne of British cookery writing returns with a fascinating survey of the enormous changes that have taken place in British cooking and eating habits during its course. Marguerite Patten has spent more than 50 years observing the British at table and teaching us how to cook. Starting with the conservative (and on occasion frankly dispiriting) cuisine of the turn of the century, Marguerite Patten's Century of British Cooking charts, decade by decade, the wholly unpredictable course subsequently taken by the national tastebuds. The late Victorian and Edwardian eras are conjured up with dishes such as "Devilled Kidneys", "Stuffed Shoulder of Mutton" and "Pulled Rabbit". Marguerite Patten even manages to make a good case for the dreaded "Brown Windsor Soup", which, it appears, came in thick and clear versions. The twenties prove to have been less exciting, foodwise, than one might have imagined; while a strenuous plainness characterises the food of the thirties and paves the way for wartime austerity. Recognisably modern tastes in food arrive in the sixties, in recipes such as the totemic "Prawn Cocktail", "Sole Veronique", "Pavlova" and "Black Forest Gateau". From then on, things grow more familiar, until the century ends with "Thai Green Curry", "Polenta au Gratin" and "Sticky Toffee Pudding". A brisk historical introduction to each chapter puts the recipes into context (the seventies: "Bananas more and more popular"). --Robin Davidson